TAS3

The TAS³ IP proposal (Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services) aims to have a European-wide impact on services based upon personal information, that is to say information which is (co-)owned by the individual, being the ‘data owner’ who has either full rights or rights shared with the ‘data controller’, typically an educational, corporate, governmental, or service organisation.

Personal information is typically generated over a human lifetime, and therefore is collected and stored at distributed locations and used in a multitude of business processes. The TAS³ architecture can be instantiated in different contexts because the nature of this personal information is not specific to TAS³.

TAS³ will provide a next generation trust & security architecture that is ready to meet the requirements of complex and highly versatile business processes; that enabling the dynamic user-centric management of policies; that ensure end-to-end secure transmission of personal information and user-controlled attributes between heterogeneous, context dependent and continuously changing systems. This includes a trust and data protection infrastructurefor managing & assessing the risks associated with identity authentication (level of assurance) and the trustworthiness of actors.

For this purpose TAS³ will research & develop a trusted architecture and set of adaptive security services which will preserve personal privacy and confidentiality in dynamic environments. It is clear that such an architecture is dependent on four very important requirements: (1) the personal information must be processed by service providers that are perceived to be trustworthy by the individuals and other service providers involved, (2) the processor of personal information must be authorized to process this information, (3) all personal information should be managed and transferred securely, and (4) cross-context processes must respect all relevant data protection requirements.

Innovation - In order to meet these requirements, TAS³ will design an open ontology of context-independent terms and concepts, and it must innovate on several levels.

First of all the TAS³ architecture will be versatile and open so that it can deal with evolving legal paradigms and with new (and possibly not yet existing) business models and their corresponding processes and technologies.

SecondlyTAS³ will enable people to perceive trust in a highly distributed and dynamic information management system that allows (a) the user to manage his personal information in a secure, trustworthy and privacy-friendly infrastructure, and (b) the service providers to easily optimise the processing of this information without introducing uncontrollable data protection and privacy risks, while keeping the business processes architecture open and based on shared concepts.

Thirdly, all parties, systems and services commit to the relevant parts of the architecture and its supporting ontologies as a contract with the community as a whole, agreeing that they adhere to these. This forms a basic fundamental aspect of the user’s trust perception. The open ontology can be dynamically updated and evolves along with the community, in order to retain its validity. Certification, standardisation, and compliance checking procedures are implemented to assure and enforce the ontology commitments over time, and gain and maintain trust.

Architecture - TAS³ proposes an open and interoperable service oriented architecture that, as a NESSI Project, will contribute to NESSI’s NEXOF architecture. The project will extend a world leading open source BPMS/SOA in allowing adaptive processes while being able to maintain the needed trust and security. Additionally, explicit architectural documentation that can be formally committed to by system parts and services is added in the form of a community-managed ontology which at all times allows for unambiguous, but flexible, meaning agreement. This ontology effectively brings together the NESSI recommendations on security, trust, and semantics. TAS³ will maintain a consistent and integrated semantic approach while describing the features of the trust architecture. This description both functions as machine-readable documentation of the architecture, and as the primary formal vehicle to exchange explicit semantic agreements (commitments) between partners and, eventually, systems. The integrated, co-evolved ontology will assure that relevant parts of the system commit to the same interpretation of possibly ambiguous elements in order to allow for meaning alignment, certification and early conflict discovery. This ontology by itself may contribute considerably to people and organisations trusting each other.

Integration - As an integrated projectTAS³will not only research and advance these various topics but it will also integrate them into a fully embedded trust architecture to automate business processes managing personal information, which will result in considerable societal benefit.

Validation - TAS³ will validate & demonstrate its generic applicability in the domains of employability and eHealth. In doing so, the project will help establish the upcoming employability (data exchange) market and the self-management of personal eHealth information by trust-enabling the processing of personal data. Overall TAS³will allow European citizens (learners, workers, patients) to self-manage their own personal information and provide at the same time trust for the increasing number of service networks that eligibly will make use of this information

In theemployability sector, the personal information will refer to the competencies, awards, interests and goals of the players, and to the current and previous activities of workers, learners, and employers, etc. The fast emerging employability market will be greatly facilitated if this personal information can be made readily available – with the users well-informed consent – for the related processes of job migration, employment, career development, and other employability processes. In fact the process view on lifelong employability of people perfectly fits in the decision number 1672/2006/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of the 24th of October 2006 establishing a Community Programme for Employment and Social Solidarity.

When instantiated in thehealthcare sector, the TAS³ architecture will provide the healthcare service providers with a unique tool to provide better services to their customer base that can use the patient’s own health parameters such as (weight, body temperature, glucose level for diabetes patients, etc.), or that are injected into the system by the laboratories; and enable the patient to request and securely access his/her own electronic medical records as required by EC Recommendation n° R (97) 5 relative à la Protection des Données Médicales. Comité des Ministres aux États Membres. 1997, which is something that few if any EMR systems can provide today.

The TAS³ Consortium consists of 18 partners from 8 different countries in a well-balanced consortium consisting of 8 universities, 2 global companies (and several more in the pilot programmes), 5 expert SMEs, 1 governmental research institute and 2 non-profit organisations.

For most participants TAS³ is the natural continuation of previous research and IST Framework projects on trust & security, lifelong learning & competence development, identity management systems, semantic technologies and adaptable business processes on the one hand and the related standardization efforts in the field of HR, learning, BPMS/SOA and other Human Factor standards involvement on the other.

Impact - As such TAS³ is the next step towards workable and trusted service networks based on or involving personal information. TAS³ is a NESSI Project with an a serious ambition to align and extend the NESSI agenda on trust and security, providing its open architecture and open source components to the NESSI reference framework. Furthermore TAS³ is backed by several already existing communities of practice aiming to take up its results (www.eurorec.org, www.eifel.org, www.HR-XML.org, www.ontology-advisory.org, the IDM Identity Management community, and the first European Human Capital & Social Innovation Technology Summit, etc…)